


you are beside me like a wall

by thermodynamicActivity (chlorinetrifluoride)



Series: The Collegestuck 'Verse [28]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-07 11:46:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6802483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlorinetrifluoride/pseuds/thermodynamicActivity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Latula Pyrope, and you accidentally find the things you’ve lost in weird places, such as a park in the middle of the night. Your friend of sixteen years, a woman you’ve long since drifted apart from, is no exception. The weirder part is that she isn’t pissed off to see you, which is weird because she tends to be pissed off about everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you are beside me like a wall

**Author's Note:**

> still going through the mass collegestuck fic-posting of 2016

> _The meaning that searches for its word like a hermit crab._  
>  A monologue that waits for one listener.  
>  An ear filled with one sound only.  
>  A shell penetrated by meaning.
> 
> _-_ Adrienne Rich

* * *

 

**_March 2009 - Latula Pyrope_ **

Four cans of energy drink, nine cigarettes, a pile of JSTOR articles, and several miles of skateboarding later, you are two thirds of the way done with your PHILO 287 paper.

Your thesis was originally some grade A bullshit that you devised just because you knew your professor would cream his poorly-pressed pants over it. 

Rule #1 of undergrad: the prof is always right, even if (and especially if) they suggest otherwise.

Having Mr. Vandayar for AP US History spoiled you, because he _really and truly wanted_ to know what you thought, and you went into college believing all professors were like that. You were adults, after all. Surely they could treat you with a certain amount of respect.

After the fourth time one of your papers received a C+ because you went deeper and more contrarian than they’d expected, you decided your paradigm needed modifying. Novel thought is for graduate school. Here, in your second year of college, you are a puppet dancing to the beat of the guy at the whiteboard.

Even Ms. Perez was less restrictive than your college professor, and she was the kind of teacher who marked you down if you came in more than a minute after the late bell. 

If you goofed off enough, she’d give you detention. If you were a special case like Crouton Amporno, who asked her how, given her visual impairment, she could possibly tell if people were late to her class, she’d threaten to suspend you.

You were privately sorry he managed to beg his way out of that one, and in retrospect, you cannot believe you two were friends as kids. 

You, him, Rufioh, Damara, Aranea, their respective siblings, and the Calver twins grew up not too far away from each other.

You flip through yet another article and curse the day you both registered for this class and decided not to write about Rousseau.

Still, now that the finish line for this paper is in sight, you’re thinking of revising your thesis to suggest that a lot of Hobbes’s ideology smacks of protofascism in certain respects, but then you’d need to do _even more research_. Also, your professor would mark you down for calling one of his idols the F word (no, not the one Kurloz is so fond of), and you need perfect grades if you stand a chance of getting into law school.

You wouldn’t believe your metamorphosis from gamer slacker into good student if you hadn’t observed it firsthand. If you went back in time to tell 15 year old Latula Pyrope that she’d be voluntarily pre-law with decent grades and everything, she’d probably tell you to get your head examined.

Even Terezi is shocked at how far you’ve come, and she shares a room with you. 

Jokingly, with all her chemistry notes neatly arranged on her bed, as if to spite your desk of utmost clutter, she points out how you’ve been neglecting your video games so much that your Xbox 360 is beginning to gather dust.

“I’ll have plenty of time for gaming during spring break,” you assure her.

Terezi gives you that inordinately creepy grin that makes it seem like she has shark teeth.

“I’ll bet.”

To be frank, though, you can’t help your lack of interest.

Single player and killing bots ad nauseam gets tedious fast, Terezi doesn’t game, and your friends who do are otherwise occupied. Mituna’s up to hir eyeballs in vector calculus and modern physics, Kurloz is trying to care for his brother in the wake of his grandmother’s death, Damara’s scrambling to get her grades up before she gets thrown out of college, and Rufioh, who has joined like ten different clubs over the last three semesters of college, no longer has much time to do anything else. He has been assimilated by the borg.

You dash off the last sentence of another paragraph, lean back in your swivel chair, and sigh. God, you hate higher education.

But, as long as you stay the course, you are going to be the second person in your family to finish college, the first being your mother. Your father did a term or two at John Jay before he dropped out to become a cop.  

And since you are the oldest child, they both expect great things from you. Summa cum laude or bust. No pressure, Latula.

Though you won’t become a nurse like your mother, she still frequently pulls you aside and tells you, _“you can be anything you want to be, mi amor.”_

Anything you want, with the caveat that anything you want had better not include skateboarding around campus until you fracture something, or playing Lego Star Wars or Halo until you end up on academic probation.

Honestly, you sort of wish your parents had pinned their expectations on your little sister. You’ve got more brains than almost everyone gives you credit for, but Terezi has certain advantages that you don’t.

For one, she’s way smarter. Perhaps not smarter than you are currently, but definitely more intelligent than you were in high school.

Also, she knows how to study the _proper_ way. You didn’t study in high school because you didn’t really give a shit. Poring over your gargantuan Pre-Calculus textbook took away time you could have spent perfecting your upside down 360 loop.

Even when you did knuckle down, and you did during your last two years of high school, you were more of a sprinter in terms of academics, while Terezi has always been a long distance runner in that respect. 

Once college rolled around and shit got real, though, something had to give in terms of your habits. 

You followed the lead of the most studious person you knew, Porrim Maryam, the dutiful nursing student that your mom would have gotten for a daughter instead of you, if all things were equal.

You watched as Porrim scrawled messages on post it notes and stuck them throughout her textbooks. Never going anywhere without a notebook under her arm. You’ve asked Mituna if hir roommate went to sleep with a copy of Saladin’s _“Human Anatomy and Physiology”_ under one arm, reciting cranial nerves instead of counting sheep, and ze wheeze-laughed so hard ze almost choked on hir dinner, and refused to respond.

That’s a yes, then.

Parental expectations aside, you had a lot to prove to yourself. That even though you feigned emptyheaded apathy, finishing high school with a 80.07 average, ranked 497 out of a class of 619, you were more than what you let on to others.

You did that and more. You’re holding your GPA at a solid 3.75, and you’re in the honors program now. But, despite your drive and ability to do well, you continue to suck at studying the traditional way.

You almost miss the days where all you wanted to be was the raddest bitch in the 10468. Nobody expected anything from you then, except for outdated slang, increasing detentions, incessant gossip and scathing reviews of video games that would put Zero Punctuation to shame.

Maybe you should have stayed that way in college, left the mask on your face until it became stuck there. Then you could have kept doing school the wrong way. 

You wouldn’t have to read and reread for two hours over concepts that take most people only half an hour to comprehend, because you wouldn’t care whether you understood it. The halfpipe would beckon you, and you would heed its siren call.

With a twinge of dread, you wonder how you expect to survive beyond the undergraduate level if you can’t do things the right way now?

To hear others tell it, studying is meant to be done at your desk, in silence, with minimal distraction. Focus on your notes and nothing else. Be conservative with your highlighter. Make sure your notes are legible. Review, review, review. Take a break every hour or so, but not for too long.

Meanwhile, you can’t sit still even when you want to. Put you in a three hour lecture class, and you’ll fidget with your pen until you snap either the clip or the barrel, tap your foot until the distraction annoys everyone in your row, leave to use the bathroom at least once or twice an hour, or some combination of the above.

You can study on buses and trains, the cacophony resolving into relaxing white noise, provided some harried bastard of a businessman doesn’t shove you and send your notes flying. You need the feeling of something kinetic to get your thoughts going.

Even doing homework at Porrim and Mituna’s apartment is less daunting than studying alone. There’s always enough going on there that you don’t feel understimulated, whether it’s Mituna shouting at Porrim for stealing hir last cigarette, Porrim giving hir the 20 megaton death glare for shredding her pretty lingerie in the washing machine ("these things are meant to be hand-washed, you know"), or Callie asking if any of them understand the law of cosines.

However, your most salient muse is your skateboard, hallowed be thy name. You can mentally write almost entire papers as you skate from one end of Queens to the other. Not only that, but the change in location helps you generate insights you’d have never considered otherwise.

But put you in front of your computer desk, sit you down at the dining room table, herd you into a lecture hall, and all your ideas sublimate into a whole lot of nothing.

The fact that your college GPA hasn’t suffered all this time is pretty much your only solace.

At Terezi, Mituna, and Porrim’s behest, you’ve thought of getting assessed for some kind of attention deficit issue, but you don’t think that’s it. You can pay attention and have astounding recall of the material at hand, just not with the methods your professors would expect.

Perhaps it’s because you’ve seen the sort of hoops your mentally ill friends have been made to jump through, but you want to keep a shrink as far away from your head as possible. You don’t want to be labeled and drugged if you can avoid it.

Besides, college students are always a little crazy by their second year, third year at max. Why should you be exempt?

Over coffee, you meet up with Ms. Perez, one of the few teachers from high school with whom you keep in regular contact. You tell her about your issues, she nods, and instead of calling you crazy, puts a reassuring hand on top of yours. 

She insists that there is no _right_ way to study so long as you find your personal methodology _effective_ in mastering the material.

While you’d agreed when she said it, you privately think such a sentiment is way easier to express after you’ve finished your formal education. 

You try to fill your mind with Hobbes to no avail.

Then, hands on your computer keyboard, you metaphorically bore holes into your computer screen with your eyeballs as if you can convince the last two pages of your paper to materialize, fully written, on the sheer force of will. 

No such luck. You notice an error in subject-verb agreement in the penultimate sentence and correct it, but other than that, you’ve hit a brick wall. Again.

You tap your foot against the adjacent wall, glance at Terezi, who is cursing up a blue streak at her assignment - _“how many damn oxidation states does this thing even have?_ ” - and pull your jacket off the back of your chair.

You put it on and pick up your skateboard, and she turns to look at you.

“Whe’re you going?”

“Out.”

She shrugs, rolls her eyes, and tells you that she’s eating the leftover Chinese food in the fridge if you’re not back in an hour.

Your mom’s working the overnight shift, and your father is away visiting his parents, so you don’t have to worry about them reading you the riot act if you get home at some ungodly time.

Bathed in streetlight fluorescence, you skate to the end of the block and keep going, letting the distance do the thinking for you.

Ideas come much better when you’re a blur moving forward, whatever direction forward happens to be.

Now, you know exactly what you want to say in that next paragraph, and wish you’d brought a pen and pad with you. Oh, well, you’ll remember the gist of it. The topic sentence at least. Still making good time on your board, you take things a step further, and sketch out the structure of the paragraph, tentative sentences to justify what you’ve asserted.

But all of them are either trite, long-winded, or both.

This is just not your night.

You let out a frustrated groan and skate faster. Past the supermarket, past a cluster of cars stuck in a jam, the darkness deepening the longer you ride. 

Bits and pieces of insightful cognition flash before you like stars - a compelling phrase here, an interesting perspective there - but nothing major and nothing permanent.

You wish you could hand in the equivalent of dogshit to this professor, may he have a sudden coronary before the midterm please God, but you do need the A.

You hit 27 Park, a dinky little thing with benches, a basketball court, a handball court, much faster than you anticipated. 

You wish you’d brought a stopwatch with you so you could mark the time and definitively declare a new record.

The park’s pretty much deserted, as befitting the late-ish hour.

Some teenagers play handball and basketball at the hoops, and a few more sit on the benches, making their usual questionable deals. Your dad, an officer with the NYPD, once laughed that much of the crime in this area could be traced back to the hoodlums that hang out around here.

That aside, you rather do like this park. It’s quiet, but not too quiet, between the smash of handballs and the clink of beer bottles. You half-raise your hand in recognition of some veteran handball players who turn to smile at you.

Let it never be said that Latula Pyrope lost any sort of game unless she were on her deathbed.

Back when you were in middle school, you and your friends used to frequent this area, playing basketball and hopscotch.

But that was ages ago.

Scanning your surroundings, it doesn’t take you long to spot yet another a familiar face amid the bench crew. 

Part of you thinks of turning around and skating in another direction. Another part of you wonders if you sought this place out on purpose, just to find this young woman. But she hasn’t come here regularly in a while. Luck of the draw, you guess.

She’s turned in the other direction, something glowing between her fingertips.

Hair arranged in a messy bun, she takes a drag off the offending object, and exhales a cloud of smoke redolent of skunk and despair. It’s definitely her, then.

A million polite greetings occur to you, but you think she deserves better than that after everything.

You sneak up behind her and cover her eyes with your hands, careful not to disturb her eye makeup.

“Guess who?”

She reaches up, and pinches your arm hard enough for you to cry out. You thump her in the back of the head.

“Ran out of CNN to watch?” She asks. 

She gives you a once over that issues two parts exasperated and one part unsurprised. She stubs her joint out on the ground, and scowls once she gets a proper look at you.

Her tone is relaxed, though nothing else about her is.

“Wouldja hold it against me if I told you to fuck off?” She asks, her accent a little more pronounced than usual.

This is your oldest friend in a nutshell. 

Damara Megido, eternally angry, frequently high, and oftentimes drunk.

You’ve known her for so long that you can’t actually remember when you met her.

Scary as it is to behold, once upon a time, you were two kids around the same age who lived two blocks away from each other played with barbies in your basement.

Once upon a time, she did not despise the entire universe for being normal while she - as she put it - felt profoundly alienated from everything around her. 

Too old to be so young.

Too fractured to mask it, unless her delinquency and disrespect is a cover. 

You’d know a lot about concealment. From the rad girl schtick you kept up during high school, Meulin’s desperate, frenetic, and unending vivacity, Kankri’s brash and loquacious pomposity, and Porrim’s compulsion to act like everyone’s mom to avoid her own problems, you may have become something of an expert in the field.

_(Porrim, who pointed all of these out to you except her own, once told you that people keep up facades to avoid becoming vulnerable. A defense mechanism of sorts. You could believe it_

_“There’s a face we show the world, a face we show our friends, and a face we see in the mirror.” You’re almost certain she paraphrased that from a philosopher, but her point stands.)_

Damara walked into 9th grade as optimistic as every other 9th grader, and graduated with a thousand-yard stare that wouldn’t look out of place in All Quiet Western Front. While you suspect her emotional changes have issued from something deeper than Rufioh’s betrayal or Meenah’s constant taunts, while you even had your own theories about it, you never asked.

_They say she got assaulted._

_They say she assaulted someone (who wasn’t Meenah)._

_They say she was in a car accident._

_They say she saw someone die._

_They say she can see the dead._

_They say she killed someone._

She never volunteered the information to anyone, not even to you. You wish that you and she hadn’t drifted apart in high school, maybe then you’d have the temerity to find out. 

But, you suppose that the truth is hers to tell, whatever it may be.

You look over at the hopscotch course, rendered nearly invisible by both darkness and age. Once upon a time, the chalk lines had been clear as day and ruler straight.

_( **April 2002 - Latula Pyrope**_

_A girl wearing a red headscarf and a long dress, another girl in a Catholic school uniform, and a girl in a cotton shirt and blue shorts attempt to hop their way to ultimate victory._

_The first girl beats the other two soundly, a faint grin on her face. You high five her, and Aranea wrinkles her nose._

_She gives a false little politician’s smile._

_“Let’s go play double dutch.”_

_“You really can’t stand losing, you know that?” Damara points out, narrowing her eyes. “Sides, we only have one jump rope.”_

_Once upon a time, anyway.)_

“Long time no see,” you say to her, trying for your kindest expression.

Damara picks up her bottle of beer and takes a long swig. 

“So, Pyrope, are you gonna hold this against me? Narc on me to your dad? Do I needa call my lawyer?”

She has been asking you the latter on a semi-regular basis since 10th grade, and you have always answered in the negative. Damara’s less than stellar life choices, and her increasingly irascible disposition aside, you would never do that. Perhaps it’s from spending too much time with Kankri, who actually got beaten up by cops for no reason in senior year, and Porrim, who has never trusted police and actively attends demonstrations against them, but you don’t exactly approve of certain policies within law enforcement, and that’s putting it mildly.

Still, before you can formulate a response, she pulls a pack of jumbo papers out of her pocket and gets ready to roll another joint. Once she’s done that, she picks up the beer bottle and plunks it down on the bench beside you in offering.

“Fair warning, that’s Olde English. They were all out of Heineken.”

You’d sooner drink untreated sewage than Olde English 800 without a second thought. It tastes like hops, fizz, and vomit.

If you’re going to jail for underage drinking, you’re not going for that.

You snort and shake your head at her, passing it back. “No thank you, Damz. I have a paper to finish.”

She raises a skeptical eyebrow.

“Really?” She takes a drag off her joint. “So then what the fuck are you doing here?”

Good question. You don’t know.

You tell her exactly this, and she gives you points for honesty with a wry half smile.

“Come to pass the evening with a terrible fucking influence, then?” she jeers, wrapping her leather jacket more tightly around herself.

You have no idea why she continues to hold that statement against you.

Your father was the one who called her a terrible influence, a criminal, and a sociopath in the making when you guys were seventeen.

_( **November 2006**_

_In 12th grade, Damara finally snapped and beat Meenah to within an inch of unconsciousness across the street from school. However, she did it after putting up with four years of almost constant taunting, in the wake of one jibe too many._

_Even Porrim, who was and is dating Meenah, had to admit that while Damara’s response had gone too far, Meenah was hardly an innocent victim of circumstances._

_“Yo, that’s like the golden fuckin’ rule though,” Mituna commented. “Talk shit, get hit.”_

_Damara apologized to Meenah - gritting her teeth the whole time - mostly so she could avoid expulsion._

_Porrim apologized to Damara on Meenah’s behalf, and that seemed to piss Damara off even more._

_“Tell Meenah grow a pair and stop sending you to do her dirty work.” She pushed Porrim gently away. “My fight’s with her, not you.”_

_After all was said and done, you continued to like Damara just fine, even if she was more unhinged than you’d thought, even if it strained your relationship with Meenah - whom you really only tolerate[d] for Porrim’s sake._

_Sure, you’d warned Damara that one more toe out of line would get her expelled, but she’d reacted with… characteristic concern._

_“What makes you think I give a shit, Tula?” She stretched her arms up toward the sky. “All I’ll do is prove my parents right.”_

_At seventeen, you hadn’t know what to say to that. At nineteen, you still don’t._

_Your father continues to hate her.)_

You pick her beer up from off the ground and take a long swig just to prove a point. It’s foul tasting and juvenile, but you’ve never exactly been a paragon of maturity.

Damara makes some comment about how she’s not giving you any street cred for breaking the law in such a stupid way.

You stop grimacing for long enough to retort. “You say this like you have legit street cred, puta.”

Damara laughs, without a hint of malice and claps you on the back.

“I missed you.”

You want to reciprocate with the same, but you’re not sure whether you miss the crossfaded young woman on the bench, or the bright-eyed 9th grader she used to be. 

It’s hard to reconcile the two of them.  

At the very least, she deserves the truth from you. Therefore, for once, you say nothing.

You two sit in companionable almost-silence, occasionally gossiping, and listening to the beat of the handball players. She drinks from her bottle (occasionally with your help) and you pretend not to notice how fast the contents are disappearing.

She asks you how your major’s going. If you and Mituna are still going strong. If Kankri's finally took a hint and hopped off your dick. You’re mid-drink when she asks the last thing, and snort so hard beer almost shoots out of your nose.

“Smooth move. Ten out of ten.”

“Too rad to replicate,” you respond.

Damara may be jaded, moody, substance-inclined, and aggressively promiscuous solely to get a rise out of the uninitiated, but she is still your Damara. 

Maybe she doesn’t know you the best anymore, maybe you’ve found other friends, even partners for that, but she’s known you for the longest. Sixteen years is nothing to sneeze at.

_(She observed your first attempts to master the skateboard, and didn’t even laugh when you fell on your face (all three times)._

_When, after attempting (and failing at) an epic stunt on icy pavement, you sprained your and and wrist and ended up with a closed skull fracture that knocked you momentarily unconscious, she sat with you while Cronus  - having actually been a cool guy back then, part of your friend group - called 911._

_She even argued with the paramedics when they hesitated to take you to Elmhurst Hospital, since the closest was NYHQ. You begged, and cried, and pleaded, but to seemingly no avail._

_“Her mom’s a fucking nurse at Elmhurst,” Damara fumed, head scarf fluttering as she whipped around to face them fully. “Take her there, damn it!”_

_Whether it was to stop you from crying, or because Damara terrified them - Damara terrifies everyone, why should medics be an exception - you got your wish._

_When Aradia was still too small to carry 25 pound bags of rice singlehandedly, but you and Damara were old enough to run errands, you and and she lugged one bag each across the mile-long distance between H-Mart and the apartment complex where the Megidos lived._

_Aradia walked in front of you two, with a head of cabbage, seasonings, and a bag of dangmyeon noodles in a considerably smaller bag. She chatted amicably with Terezi, who, having also gone on this excursion, carried bag of groceries in her hand._

_“Stay where we can see you,” Damara told her sister in Korean, as they neared the end of the block. “Don’t cross without me.”_

_Though you could not understand what Damara said, until she clarified later, you gave Terezi a similar warning as you waited for the light to change._

_“Stupid question,” Terezi asked, in a tone that betrayed that she planned to demand an answer regardless. “Why’s my bag the lightest?”_

_You and Damara exchanged glances._

_“We didn’t want you have to focus on too many things,” Damara replied. “You have enough to do.”_

_Terezi shot her a look of purest loathing but let the comment slide, muttering something you couldn’t catch, no doubt vitriolic. Three blocks later, in flagrant disregard of the red light, a car went speeding down Northern Blvd. Terezi extended her cane in front of Damara to stop her from walking into its path._

_“Who’s the unfocused one now?” Terezi asked._

_In 9th grade, when Damara tried her hardest to learn Japanese from the subbed versions of anime that you two had once seen on Toonami, her high school foreign language class, and online resources of dubious accuracy, when she took to carrying Pocky around like some sort of holy relic, you never mocked her. You wouldn’t have. Everyone was embarrassing in 2003.)_

Here, in the present time, she passes you her joint, a high honor.

You take a perfunctory inhale to be polite, and this time she does laugh incessantly at you, partially because she is higher than a 747, but mostly because you can’t stop coughing.

You take another sip of beer. Her expression has softened before she asks her next question.

“So what are you actually doing here? Don’t you have anything better to do?”

You could tell her that you think best when you’re moving, but you’re not moving anymore.

Luckily, you don’t have to answer, because Damara goes on anyway.

“Guess you’re not leaving anytime soon.”

“Probably not.”

More silence. You’ve never much liked quiet; it makes you think too much, wonder too many things. It’s a void that you’re always desperate to fill, no matter how inane whatever you say happens to be.

You tap your foot against the ground and glance up at Damara.

“So how’s Aradia doing?”

“Sleeping, most likely,” she replies smoothly.

You slug her in the arm for that, and she laughs. “You _know_ what I mean.”

“Yeah, and I reiterate.” A car passes, and her eyes flick momentarily up to check its movements. “What about Terezi?”

Oh god. Your sister. Your sister and all her drama.

You love Terezi to death, but you will never understand what she sees in some of her friends. Damara must catch sight of the look on your face for what she says next.

“That bad?”

Worse.

“She’s dating Vriska.” You spit the name like a piece of stale gum. “Kanaya keeps trying to keep the peace between them, but—” God, you hate being a lightweight and unable to find your words when you need them. “But you’d need a fucking Berlin Wall to keep the peace between them.”

Damara makes some smartass comment about Maryams and their knack for constant interference even when it’s not required (or desired for that matter), one that gives you pause.

Even if you can’t see her face too well in the low light, you can tell she’s on the border between tipsy and legitimately drunk, since when Damara’s within shouting distance of sober, the Maryam sisters are quite low on her list of people to dislike.

It could be argued that she actually likes them, at least if one defines “like” as “hates them less than almost everyone else.”

Still she seldom shit-talks people without reason, for the exception of Horuss.

Obviously one of the Maryams, Porrim more than likely, did something to offend her. 

You’re well-accustomed to using a certain amount of finesse and diplomacy around your friends, particularly when they’re pissed, but Damara’s the kind of person who thinks you’re manipulating her if you’re not Mituna-levels of blunt. She barely trusts her own shadow.

You take another gulp of beer, and straighten your glasses.

“Did Porrim do something to upset you?”

Damara finishes the remainder of the bottle in a herculean chug, and wipes the back of her mouth with her hand, gaze focused on nothing in particular. She kicks at a nearby pebble and digs another 40 oz bottle out of her bag. Her third, apparently.

She truly astounds you sometimes.

“She found out I was on academic probation,” Damara says through gritted teeth. “Dunno who fucking told her, probably Tuna, since ze can’t keep hir mouth shut.”

That explains part of it, then. Clever as Tuna may be, keeping secrets without explicit warning to say nothing is not one of hir strong suits.

You wrap an arm around Damara’s shoulders, like 2002, like you two are still falling asleep against each other on the bus ride to Bayside to hang out with Aranea.

She neither recoils nor leans into you. You press on.

“Girl, I don’t think you have to worry about her telling anyone. She knows how to keep a secret.”

Damara balls up her fists, unclenches them, and exhales, shaking her head.

“She asked me if I needed _help_ with any of my classes. Said she could _tutor_ me if I wanted.”

You continue to fail to understand why this is a bad thing.

“M’ija, no offense, but you need all the help you can get.”

You’re vaguely worried that she’ll either slap you silly, or curse you out from here clear to Astoria for that, but all she does is nod, eyebrows knit together. 

A handball hits the fence a few inches away from the bench, and she flinches. Then she goes silent once more.

“I hate her, though,” Damara finally confesses. “Shouldn’t, but I hate the bitch.”

You should probably be more offended at what she’s said about Porrim. Your friend with benefits. The third point on your triangle, the one you didn’t know you needed until she was there. One of the few people you trust unconditionally.

But Damara looks so bitter and so lost that any objection you’d have toward her tone dies before it leaves your brain.

Speaking of which, you sort of wish Porrim were around to give you advice.

She’d find a way to smooth everything over, using that gentle voice she reserves for defusing arguments. She’d listen, and at least try to understand.

You rack your brains for reasons anyone could be angry at Porrim, besides her knack for running herself ragged despite any and all warning signs.

A year or two ago, you were pissed with her for continuing to see you and Mituna while she kept dating Meenah, but you don’t feel that way anymore. God knows that the relationships going on between your friends have become some kind of bizarre love octagon. 

Porrim just happened to be the first to approach the whole thing with honesty. You appreciate that much.

You inhale from the mostly spent joint that Damara passes you. “Why d’you hate her, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Damara treats you to a tirade about how unfailingly kind she can be, how she’s always been smart - look at the once valedictorian - attractive, and considerate, how she’s always perfectly well put together, not even a hair out of place, constantly ready to answer questions in class like she’s memorized the whole damn textbook beforehand.

“She asked me if I needed help with classes right after she found out, it’s like she was fucking bragging about how better she is,” Damara sneers. “I don’t want anything from her. If she _really_ wanted to help me, where fuck was she in junior year, with Meenah?”

Much as you don’t want to admit it, Damara does have a point there. You formulate a weak defense.

“She told Meenah to lay off you repeatedly,” you inform her. “Maybe she’s trying to make amends.”

Damara laughs drily, bitterly.

“Oh sure, she _told_ Meenah to be nice. Never saw that one into action, so fuck her,” Damara keeps ranting, “And hell, it’d be one thing if Porrim were actually mean, but I can barely find a goddamn thing really to hate her for, and that’s even more fucking annoying.”

Damara stands up abruptly, and sways so steeply that you put an arm around your shoulders to keep her steady.

An idle thought, that you probably aren’t going to get any work done tonight, fades as quickly as it comes.

You steer Damara out of the park and onto the boulevard.

Whoever said school mattered more than friends is the same liar who told you that your college actually cares about your well-being. You think of Kankri’s ill-timed first day of senior year protest.

_(He launches into one of his usual speeches, this particular one focused on how dehumanizing the college process is. That has to be the first time all of you agree with every word he says._

_As he speaks, he gains volume, and his hands shake with frustration._

_“We are so much more than letters and numbers, than points on a scattergram,” he shouts. “We are human beings!”_

_“Right fuckin’ on!” Mituna yells._

_The two of them start up a chant of “Fuck naviance! Fuck college confidential! Fuck this system!”_

_All of you got detentions, and it was totally worth it.)_

You walk Damara toward your house.

Neither of your parents are home, and while Terezi will most definitely play twenty questions with you, she’ll keep this a secret. 

Having gotten YOLO wasted with Mituna and Kankri before, you are no stranger to the melancholy drunk, but Damara has never been one to be sad. Just angry.

So this throws you for a loop, seeing her anger transmute into sadness.

“I did the fucking calculations, and even if i get straight A’s this semester, it’s still not going to be enough for a 2.0,” she says, eyes glittering. She tugs her scarlet dress down so that it properly covers her ass.

“Maybe you could petition advising,” you suggest. “Show them that you’re determined to do well, that you have been doing a lot better. You _have_ been doing a lot better.”

“Yeah, and maybe that’d be a waste of train fare. They don’t a flying fuck about us and you know it.”

You can’t argue with that, so you don’t.

Weaving, despite your efforts to keep her steady, Damara points to a bodega and stands under the light of the awning, the illumination from above making her momentarily resemble like an angel, her features thrown into stark relief. She hooks her thumb in the direction of the door.

“Remember the ice cream, Tuuula?” She asks, slurring the last word, and wearing an almost childlike smile. It takes you half a minute to realize that Damara hasn’t lapsed into complete incomprehensibility.

It’s Supreme Deli, the place where the guy at the counter would give you a free ice cream - vanilla or chocolate - if you brought in a current report card with straight A’s. 

You take her hand, squeeze it, and help her. “Yeah, I remember.” 

She slides to a sitting position on the ground, looking positively enraged.

“No goddamn ice cream for me.”

If you thought you’d seen weird drunks, you’ve clearly never saw Damara shitfaced.

Half the time she’s determined to throw herself at any and everyone who passes by, seldom in English. The pitfalls of being a polyglot, you suppose. . You yank her out of danger more often than you can count on one hand. 

You keep walking her toward your house, walking faster when she starts yelling unintelligible propositions at the various young men and women leaving or entering bars on this block. Only Damara could proposition someone in three different languages - English, Farsi, and Korean. You’d be amazed if you weren’t worried.

The other half of the time, she’s wanders through recollections. She points out all sorts of buildings, alleys, and storefronts and asks you if can remember certain moments from few years ago.

The italian place - now closed down - where you, Rufioh, she, Aranea, Cronus, and an assorted array of their siblings devoured caesar chicken pizza and played Yugioh cards. The laundromat that shredded one of Calliope’s uniform skirts into plaid-colored New Year’s Eve confetti, much to her brother’s amusement. The 7-11 on 23rd Avenue, the most hallowed of designated meeting points while you all still lived around here. The hill at the end of 128th street, where the nearby factories dump their garbage, a place everyone’s parents unanimously forbade them to venture, so naturally it became your fort.

She wishes she could go back, she whispers to you. Do it again. Do it right.

“But I can’t,” she adds.

You often wish for the same thing, so you don’t know what to tell her.

On the edge of your block, Damara leans against the sign that reads “Dead End”, pulls rolling paper out of her pocket, but decides better of smoking another J.

You text Porrim to tell her that you are most definitely not Skyping with her and Mituna tonight. 

You send off another text to Aradia informing her that you and Damara are having a sleepover at your place. If she doesn’t buy it, she doesn’t say. You assume that dating one of the Captor siblings has given her the ability to roll with anything.

Damara’s eyes open weakly at the sound of your phone. You sit down on the sidewalk next to her, feeling the dampness of the ground seep slowly into the bottom of your jeans. Once you tell her that you’ve contacted Aradia, Damara smiles again, letting her head sag onto your shoulder.

Then, she launches into semi-exultant tirade about how great her sister is.

Aradia doesn’t lose it the way Damara does. She’s really good at school. She’s empathetic and kind. She’s watched the Indiana Jones movies nine hundred times. She wants to go to college to study Anthropology. She doesn’t always understand her sister, but she tries to help. She uses the stupidest emoticons sometimes. Even when she’s angry, she never raises her voice. 

But she’s not weak, no, just mellow. She doesn’t let people push her around. Damara points to her long, wavy hair, and mimes tying it back with something.

“Ahyoung’s brave, too. She’s observant. She keeps the faith. Even when she’s scared, it never stops her.”

You think of pointing out that it would have been slightly easier to wear the hijab in the city in 2006 than it would have been in during early 2002, but settle for smiling and kissing Damara on the forehead.

“You must have set a good example, then.”

She barks out a laugh that sends several pigeons flying.

“Great fucking example I am,” she fumes. “I’ve fucked up my life, my parents are going to kill me, and everyone hates me.”

“Everyone doesn’t–”

Damara tugs you sharply down by the collar, exhaling beer fumes in your face, some of her lipstick on her teeth.

“They. Do.” she says. “Hating me, afraid of me, same fucking difference. I walk into a room and everyone leaves.”

You chew on one of your fingernails, unsure of what to say.

“I don’t hate you. Kurloz doesn’t hate you. Neither do Tuna or Pornstar.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, that’s ‘cause Kurloz is a weirdo, Tuna is equally weird, and Porrim’s busy feeling sorry for me. Fuck, even King Sleazy Bastard has a higher approval rating than me.”

Okay, you can definitely refute that one, expression deadpan. “Cronus has no approval rating to speak of.”

That cheers her up by an infinitesimal degree. 

“Point taken. Still, that’s like setting the bar underground.”

Too true. She jokes around that she’d like to have “Higher Approval Rating than Crouton” - you coined the name Crouton Amporno for that kid way back when - as her epitaph.

You and she walk arm-in-arm the last few feet to your house. 

Damara steals your pocket mirror, which once belonged to Mituna, who stole it from Porrim, and tries to look a little less like she’s been crying her makeup off.

An hour later, after you’ve gotten Damara to shower, and let her borrow some of your pajamas, the two of you crowd onto your twin sized bed.

Terezi, still doing her homework, barely spares you a glance.

“Is it movie night or something?” She wants to know, gazing up from her book at last.

You plop down upon her desk a bag of Fritos you got from the deli while Damara was stuck in her sentimental reverie.

“You could say that.”

Terezi shrugs and demands that you watch anything but The Lord of The Rings.

“I ate your Chinese food,” she adds.

Not like you were holding your breath for that one.

“I forgive you.”

“Great, ‘cause I didn’t apologize," she says with a grin. 

For maybe the thirtieth time since you’ve met her, Damara calls Terezi cool. Your little sister fist-bumps her in response.

After Terezi has finally decided to call it a night, brushes her teeth, and turns out the lights, it’s down to you and Damara in your bed, trying not to elbow each other in any major internal organs.

This bed was a lot bigger the last time you had a sleepover with her. Also, it didn’t smell like cheap beer and cheaper weed.

Before she closes her eyes, Damara tells you one of those fragile uncertain truths that people only let slip on the verge of slumber.

She throws an arm around you, and smiles against your neck.

It’s not like sleeping between Porrim and Mituna on that ratty futon in Chinatown where there’s a 50/50 chance such an action is a prelude to sex. 

Damara just exhales gently.

“I’m really proud of you, Tula,” she murmurs with a warmth you haven’t heard from her in years. You chalk it up to her drunkenness. “All the shit you did.”

“Really? Why?”

You’re disorganized, your attention span is shit, you’re undeniably brilliant, but you have a sneaking suspicion that more than a few of your friends preferred Cool Radical Latula to the astute, analytical college version, even Kankri. 

His distance wounds deeper than you’d like to admit. You and he, well, it's hard to say what you and he ever were.

You think of a poem: The Road Not Taken

So you thought he was like Mituna, Porrim, and Kurloz, who always suspected your capabilities, but apparently…

Apparently not.

“Cause, you’re really great,” she insists. “And you’re different now, but in a good way.”

You ease your glasses off your face. “I would hope so.”

You look up at the ceiling, the same one you’ve had for the last nineteen years, and squeeze your eyes shut. Open them again. Everything in its right place.  Then, running a fingertip across Damara’s face, you tell her how proud you are of her as well. 

If she’s surprised, she doesn’t have a retort.

You’d add something trite and saccharine, like, “I want you to be proud of you”, but that isn’t how you operate.

Instead, you give voice to the thought you’d had in the park, having answered your unspoken question at last, just as you begin to drift off. 

“I’ve missed you too, Damara.”

And you really have. 

Idly, sleepily, you recall a single afternoon from 10th grade. It’s become fuzzy with age, but you find that if you dust it off, it plays back easily enough.

_( **June 2004**_

_In the courtyard across the street from school, Mituna and Kurloz held one end of two jump ropes._

_With one glance Rufioh could already tell, with a groan, what the plan of the lunch period was, but refused to get roped into it, eliciting several dirty jokes from Mituna’s diretion._

_Porrim wasn’t playing, since_ it w _asn’t her turn anymore, which left you and Damara to go for it._

_Mituna and Kurloz began at a slow pace, turning the ropes with such fluidity that they might as well share a mind, the rope rhythmically slapping the pavement. You jumped in first, but Damara performed some crazy leap and got into the rhythm effortlessly._

_“Strawberry shortcake, cream on top,” Mituna called in his highest falsetto. “Tell me the name of your sweetheart. Is it A-B-C-D…?”_

_“Not like you’re ever really gonna to get any,” Damara interrupted, winking at Mituna, and doing so without tripping over the rope.)_

Nostalgia, you reflect, is a lot like fire. Capable of consuming everything and leaving a path of ash in its wake, but also capable of keeping people warm. 

As the night goes on, and you stare at the hushed rise and fall of Damara’s stomach, you push your worried thoughts into the corner of your mind. Not with complete success, but it’s a step forward.

You consider warmth.

You consider serendipity.

You turn over, switch off Terezi’s night light, and go to sleep.


End file.
